Lambertville Gallery of Fine Art displays work of many accomplished artists

Laurence A. Campbell's "The City at Twilight" is among the works on display at the Lambertville Gallery of Fine Art.

Elva Brusca, owner of the Lambertville Gallery of Fine Art, says it all started with artist Laurence A. Campbell 26 years ago.

She had just begun plans to shift the focus of the gallery from both antiques and fine art to just fine art when she learned Campbell had left the gallery with which he had been associated previously.

“I owned some of his works and loved them, so I contacted him, and he turned out to be my most successful artist,” she says.

According to Brusca, Campbell’s love of art began in his youth, as he grew up a few blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he visited often. He studied architecture at Temple University and built houses, but always continued painting, collecting art and doing art restoration.

Campbell ultimately closed his construction business and established his Gallery 35 in Westmont, which he operated until he closed it in the 1990s.

On display in the Lambertville Gallery of Fine Art is his oil painting of a city street with snow falling on flags lining the street with tall buildings, cars, and pedestrians. The painting is reminiscent of the well-known paintings of similar scenes by Childe Hassam and other American and French impressionists. In this, Campbell brings his own vision and color sense.

He is known nationally for his Bucks County landscapes and Philadelphia streetscapes and waterfronts, as well as his paintings of New Jersey beach scenes.

“For many years now, his own painting has been his passion,” Brusca says. “Throughout his career as an artist, there has been no marketing to speak of. He has never joined any art associations. He shuns publicity, promotional events and art shows. His paintings have been offered at auction and have reached a record $93,600. He is rarely seen in public.”

Anthony Ventura is another fine artist represented by Brusca in the gallery. Given the honor of becoming a signature member of the international organization the American Watercolor Society, Ventura has been creating art for about 50 years. He began his art education on the G.I. Bill after World War II at the Newark Academy of Art.

On display in the gallery is his “By the Sea,” showing a red house on a hill of green by the side of a bay. Sunlight drenches the scene in freshness, as it also does the boat in “Up for Repairs” as it waits in golden grasses beyond a split rail fence.

In a recent interview for Fine Arts Passions, Ventura told Bob Considine that he’d been exhibiting his art professionally since about 1969. “I couldn’t quit now if I wanted to,” he said. “Art keeps me alive.”

Also on display in the gallery among the works of many other artists are Marjarie Arcuri’s small, beautifully done individual oil paintings of birds. One in particular is a chickadee on a branch with strong light falling on its feathers on one side as it perches on a branch against a golden sienna background. Presented in a square black frame, this and the other companion bird portraits are outstanding.

Arcuri’s birds work well displayed near Renate Wehmeyer’s oil still lifes that are like those painted centuries ago, emitting a “very still” quality. A native of Germany, Wehmeyer immigrated to New Jersey in 1985. She studied at the Ridgewood Art Institute and privately with painters and illustrators, and perfected her style to the degree that, among many other awards, she has been conferred three gold medals in the Southwestern Artists Association’s Grumbacher Fine Art Show and Sale in Arizona.

On display at the Lambertville gallery are several of her modest-size still life gems, in which she paints in fine, but painterly detail, objects such as blue and white vases or a white sugar bowl trimmed in gold

A larger painting by Wehmeyer is her “Old Times,” which, in a classically traditional table-top still life, she offers a bowl of purple and yellow pansies and a dish of lemons sharing a lavender cloth with an antique coffee pot on legs.

Widely known for her ability to capture a dog’s personality and then portray it in oils or sketched in pencil on parchment, she was given the top awards for her oil paintings and drawings at the Dog Art Show in Wichita, Kansas, and in the Dog Fancy Show in New York City. On display in the gallery is her painting of a white and brown Jack Russell standing on a flat rock outdoors.

These are but four of the many accomplished artists whose works are on display on an often-refreshed basis at the Lambertville Gallery of Fine Art, where owner Brusca is known for having an especially good eye for art.

“This is not work for me, it’s fun,” she says. “I’ve been here 26 years, and I love it as much as when I started.”